


Keepsake

by obsolete_theory (ersatzbeta)



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Hakkai-centric, Introspection, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-09
Updated: 2011-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-19 04:34:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/196933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ersatzbeta/pseuds/obsolete_theory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hakkai remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keepsake

**Author's Note:**

> The prefacing poem was written by Izumi Shikibu, a well-known poet of the Heian era. This translation was found in the book "The Ink Dark Moon," with translations by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Atani. My apologies for taking the love out of a love poem.

_Why haven't I  
thought of it before?  
This body,  
remembering yours,  
is the keepsake you left._

He thinks of her sometimes. Even as he lies in bed—or, if not in a bed, then on a pallet on the floor of a crowded inn-room, or in a sleeping bag in a tent in the wilds between civilizations and hundreds of miles from what was once his home—he thinks of her.

Somewhere, somehow, between her disappearance and his coming out the other side with a new, heaven-granted life and name, he has lost everything that was once hers—except, perhaps, himself, and he finds himself debating that as well.

Every time he looks at his own hands, now, he knows the truth. She had seen goodness in him, kindness, but he has nothing of that in him now. He is a monster. Not because he wears the skin of a man over his youkai heart—it would be so easy, so convenient, to blame that part of himself—but because he listened to the monks who were trying to save him, and he smiled and nodded and did his best to bury his feelings for her, to root out and destroy those best parts of himself. Under their careful tutelage—and he knew they meant well, which only made it worse—he cultivated indifference toward her. He learned to hate her, though the monks probably hadn't meant to teach him that. And because he hated her, hated her imperfectly and couldn't quite let go, he hated himself as well. He still hates.

Sometimes he breathes in, and it feels like there's a knife buried inside him, the point of it digging in just above the scar on his belly. He forgets that he is himself and he thinks, dazedly, that—he has taken the knife from her still-warm hands and has used it on himself. He is in the process of bleeding out in Hyakugen Maoh's dungeon, and all this around him, the life he's lived and the people he's met and the miles he's traveled and all the days and nights since she left him, is his brain trying to process the last few seconds of life that he has as his organs shut down and he breathes his last breath and—she wouldn't recognize him if they were both alive and in the same place and were passing each other in the street. They are, or would be, different people these days.

And he knows he's a different person now. He fills the space she left behind as best as he can—with politeness and order, with friends, with the journey they find themselves on—and sometimes, for a few intoxicating seconds or minutes or hours, his stop-gap measures are enough. But then, suddenly—a flash of Gojyo's hair or Goku bouncing in the back of the jeep or the bitter smoke of Sanzo's cigarettes or the first few drops of a rainstorm—that vast, dark gap in his soul yawns wide, swallows his inner numbness—he can't really call it inner peace—and he is back where he started.

And still, he thinks of her.

He cannot escape his memories: all of this and more travels with him. Within him. She is still there. When he breathes, it's like he's breathing for both of them—he's probably the only person alive who even remembers who she is. He finds her face in his own, lurking just beneath the surface. Every time he smiles, he remembers her smile. She's smiling with him, even when that smile means they are broken on the inside.


End file.
